Enable AirPrint for all connected Mac printers

Jerry Stratton, December 31, 2012

The handyPrint Preference Pane automatically lists connected printers; all you have to do is turn it on.

I almost never need to print from the iPad. I’ve owned it for almost two years now and while I’ve occasionally thought it might be nice to print, I’ve never felt the need even so much as to do a Google search on AirPrint software for the Mac. The iPad is a futuristic device: among its many other features, it’s a portable paper library. I print because I need to carry the printout somewhere I can’t bring my computer. But if I’m looking at something on the iPad, why would I need to print?

I finally ran into a reason this morning: a local movie theater that does reservations and sends the tickets by email but wants a printout at the booth. I really did not want to have to get out of bed and go log into the iMac just to print this out. Obviously, I was going to have to no matter what since I had no other options, but I finally decided to search for options to fix this in the future.

I came up with three options: Printopia, FingerPrint, and handyPrint. This is not going to be an in-depth review of them; while Printopia appears to be the favorite of professional reviewers, it also costs $20, which seemed a bit steep just to broker between the iMac and AirPrint. FingerPrint also costs $20 and doesn’t have the same following Printopia has.1 However, handyPrint2 is much less expensive: you’re asked to donate whatever you think it’s worth to you, a minimum of $1.00.3

I was a little leery of handyPrint at first, because the Printopia site says that one of its features is “No Need To Modify Your Operating System” and explains this feature as “Beware of printing solutions that re-configure your Mac’s printing system. Printopia runs independently from printer sharing, and does not modify your Mac or iOS operating system in any way.”

I was thus prepared to cancel at the first request for the admin password if it turned out that handyPrint was one of those other printing solutions that muck with the OS. However, as far as I can tell all handyPrint installs is a Preference Pane, and it is smart enough to install it locally to the current account rather than try to muck up the entire system. It never asked for a password. In fact, it never asked for anything except to be turned on: I installed it, it brought up the Preference Pane with the big “Off/On” toggle set to “Off”. I switched it “On” and was immediately able to print from the iPad.

If you’re still using Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) as I am, you’ll need to choose the 3.1.x version (3.1.3 as I write this). The newer version requires either Lion or Mountain Lion, and adds new features such as printing directly to PDF.

FingerPrint does have the advantage of having both a Macintosh and a Windows version; as far as I can tell, Printopia and handyPrint only have Macintosh versions.

The instructions for creating a “reduce PDF file size” filter in Lion are the same as for earlier versions of Mac OS X—except that for some reason ColorSync saves the filter in the wrong place (or, I guess, Preview is looking for them in the wrong place).

If you do a lot of automated command-line scripts, you probably also generate a lot of mail to /var/mail. OS X only has the mail program built-in, and its GUI mail client hasn’t been able to add simple mail accounts since about OS X 10.2. Alpine can get you a better mail client, and Geektool can provide better notices.

If you want to stack multiple windows directly on top of each other, it’s easy to do in any well-behaved application, such as Nisus Writer Pro, Safari, Mail, and even older applications like AppleWorks 6 and Microsoft Word X.

Comments?

I did run across Print n Share while looking for these apps. However, Print n Share runs on the iOS device (iPad/iPod/iPhone) rather than on the computer that the USB printer is hooked up to. As far as I can tell from the description, printing using Print n Share requires opening Print n Share to print the thing you want to print.

If you’re looking at something in an app on the iOS device and you want to print it, you have to use the “open in” option from the share icon and then be able to open it in Print n Share.

I was looking for something that would let me print directly from the print option in the share icon. These three all claim to be able to do that.

Hey - thanks for the helpful info man. I'm hoping you can clarify something for me - because I'm not too tech savvy.

If you use handyPrint (or FingerPrint/Printopia) to print pictures with your iPad 2 - does your PC/Mac computer have to be on at the time itself? Sorry if thats a dumb question. I just was hoping there was a way to print from my iPad w/o the computer itself on. or Would this work w/ that "Print n Share" app?

But I do have my iMac and MBP on most of the time - just in Sleep mode. Would I be able to print with my computer in sleep mode? Thanks for any info.

Yes, the computer has to be turned on and awake for handyPrint and the other options I looked. It’s my Mac that is making my USB printer available as an AirPrint printer.

Print n Share claims (I haven’t used it) to be able to print to networked printers besides AirPrint-enabled printers. So if your printer is a WiFi printer (or a network printer and is on your WiFi network) but not an AirPrint printer, it’s possible Print n Share will be able to print to it. However, if your computer is a USB printer, something needs to make it available “over the air”; that something is likely to be your computer, which will then need to be on and awake.

In other words, if your printer makes itself available to the network on its own, Print n Share might (and judging from its reviews probably will) be able to print to it without the assistance of a computer. But if your printer is a USB printer or otherwise needs to be plugged into a computer to work, then your computer will need to be on and awake to use it.

Yes, the Mac that the USB printer is plugged into needs to be on and available. In our case, we already have Printer Sharing turned on so that our laptops can print; and we don’t use an inkjet printer but rather an old HP 1012 laser printer.

Note, I assume you meant that Printer Sharing blocks automatic sleep; I put my iMac to sleep every night even though Printer Sharing is on. I sometimes have to put it to sleep twice, but it does go to sleep.

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